war

We frail humans are at one time capable of the greatest good and, at the same time, capable of the greatest evil. Change will only come about when each of us takes up the daily struggle ourselves to be more forgiving, compassionate, loving, and above all joyful in the knowledge that, by some miracle of grace, we can change as those around us can change too.
~Maíread Maguire
War would end if the dead could return.
~Stanley Baldwin
Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind...War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
~ John F. Kennedy

war propaganda

There is no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland.
~ George W. Bush(1946- ) 43rd US President: Source: In a speech on August 7, 2002

The war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times.
~ Joseph Paul Goebbels (1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister in: The Göebbels Diaries, 1942-1943

All our political forms are exhausted and practically nonexistent. Our parliamentary and electoral system and our political parties are just as futile as dictatorships are intolerable. Nothing is left. And this nothing is increasingly aggressive, totalitarian, and omnipresent. Our experience today is the strange one of empty political institutions in which no one has any confidence any more, of a system of government which functions only in the interests of a political class, and at the same time of the almost infinite growth of power, authority, and social control which makes any one of our democracies a more authoritarian mechanism than the Napoleonic state.
~ Jacques Ellul

suffering

Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy, which transports us into the soul and heart of another person. ln those transparent moments we know other people's joys and sorrows, and we care about their concerns as if they were our own.
~ Fritz Williams
It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
~ Samuel Johnson

...when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.
~ Sogyal Rinpoche
He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
~ William Shakespeare

the freedom to think and speak

We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men.
~ Gerald W. Johnson - (1890-1980) Source: American Freedom and the Press, 1958

And I honor the man who is willing to sink half his present repute for the freedom to think, and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak.
~James Russell Lowell: - (1819-1891) Poet and author Source: A Fable for Critics, 1848

This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths.
~ Simon Heffer Source: Daily Mail, 7 June 2000

An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment.
~ Justice Hugo L. Black: (1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice Source: NY Times Company vs. Sullivan, 1964

war is barbarous and will not resolve conflicts

Pope John Paul II: "We can enrich our common heritage with a very simple
discovery that is within our reach, namely that war is the most barbarous
and least effective way of resolving conflicts."

leaders & war

A tyrant... is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
~ Plato - (429-347 BC), Source: The Republic

Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency'. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And 'emergency' became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains. ~ Herbert Hoover (1874-1964), 31st US President

peace & poverty

Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free. ~ HH the Dalai Lama